I have to say the past four days have been . . . dare I say . . . blissful.

Got a lot of gardening work done with Hubby, Kid #1 had a suprise after-school movie and sleep over with his new best friend on Friday, Kid #2 got A LOT of craft time, and Kid #3 had lots of opportunities to practice baseball and basketball.

What's the one thing that's screwing the whole thing up?

I am waiting to see if our passports will be showing up so we can go on a trip to Cancun that we've been planning since December.

Okay . . . this is just a mini rant because I'll admit this is partly MY FAULT.

Last December (around Christmas) my mom calls to ask me what I think of flying the whole family to Cancun and meeting her at a resort that my Aunt and Uncle have a time share at during Spring Break.

I think . . . okay . . . this could be fun.

She then warns me that the passport rules will be changing and that all 5 of us (including the kids) will need passports. Now . . . neither Hubby or I have passports because we've never had the inclination to do much traveling (we're BIG homebodies).

So after the haze of the holidays finally cleared, I'm ready to look for my birth certificate. I have all the kids' in the S-D box and Hubby had just gone to San Francisco in November to get his for his real estate license. I check my S-D box . . . nothing. I check all my personal effects (including my baby book) . . . nothing. I finally call my mom . . . nope, she didn't have it either.

Hubby finally goes online and orders ONE copy from one of those Birth certificate services (since I was born in Los Angeles). After about two weeks I get my BC the beginning February. The day after, all 5 of us went to the Post Office to order our passports.

The gal tells us we don't need the expedited service because even though they're working about 8 weeks out, we should we them in time for our trip (April 7).

Okay . . . my mom comes up for a visit the weekend of March 17th. She asks if we have our passports yet and I tell her, "Not yet but we should have them soon." I go online and check the passport website. It stated our applications are being processed and we should receive them the week of April 2nd.

Last Tuesday I checked again . . . no date is posted for when we should be receiving our passports . . . .

SHIT!

So then I spent three days trying to get through both the main passport line and the automated to see if we could get an appointment at the SF passport office. On Thurday night I finally got through the automated line . . . the earliest appointment isn't until April 11th . . . the day before we're supposed to be coming home from Cancun.

I noted on the website that the passport office opens at 6am EDT . . . that means . . . yes, I did get up at 3am California time to try to talk to a human being at the passport office.

Did I get through . . . YES!

Did she tell me that our passports would be making to us before our trip . . . NO!

Apparently all she could do was flag our application as URGENT and hope for the best.

There was nothing else I could do.

I proceeded to stay up for another hour coming up with a bunch of questions as to WHY we we're going to be getting our passports and trying to figure out all the angles as to how we could make this work.

So in about 4 hours I will be getting up so I can call and hear someone answer all my questions and still tell me we're screwed.

The only good thing out of this is I did talk to my mom on Friday and gave her the lowdown on what was going on and that I was exhausting all my options. After the eventual "I told you so," I did tell her that if things didn't work out for Cancun, that we'd come down and visit her in So Cal and spend Easter with her.

That seemed to do the trick.

So . . . I've got everything crossed in hopes that I can still salvage some of my upcoming spring break week.

Stay Tuned . . . .